Archbishop Óscar Romero’s birthday was last week. My family marked the date with a trip to a pupusería for dinner, something I know some other friends were doing a couple time zones away. I know that the Catholic church is in the process of beatifying him, which I think is maybe how you become a saint. No longer a believer myself, I’m only glad that I was able to pray at Romero’s tomb while in El Salvador in 2002.

Americans would do well to understand that our current refugee crisis with unaccompanied Central American minors has everything to do with the atrocities against which Romero bravely preached and U.S. involvement in those atrocities.

Por un Futuro Mejor

When asked about the warMiguel lifts his shirt to showa tangle of scars froma homemade bomb.

Imagine Miguel in conflict outsideel Museo de la Revolución Salvadoreña,tracing the lines on his stomach,which is now so uneasy.

A neighborhood of sadness and struggle,como la linea.

La Linea where he makes his home,a sprawling slum from San Martínto Soyapango and beyond,a sea of shacks on a decommisioned rail line.

Miguel remembers it wasn’t always this way.He tells a story of a boy he grew up withwho lost his legs to a speeding train.

“The existence of poverty as a lackof what is necessaryis an indictment.”

Miguel never heard the Archbishop’s wordsbroadcast on rebel radiowhile fighting on the other side,but he can’t get them out of his head.

Imagine me in Morazánoutside that same museum.Me and Miguel and Monterrosa’s ghostand a myriad of unanswerable questionsabout life and death, wealth and withoutand history’s immutable thirst for blood.

Animate an arrow on a map. Imbued with all of the cultural sensitivity of an Indiana Jones movie.

Launch in lush Laotian jungle, cross continents and seas, and split like the forked tongue of a serpent, or a dragon, upon reaching the Mississippi.

One end lands in Minneapolis, calls itself Fong Lee, and falls, one weekend outside an elementary school on the beleaguered North Side.

No saint, this Fong Lee, or maybe he was, or maybe it doesn’t matter, when chased on a bike by cops in a squad car.

When rammed, run down, when running like hell isn’t enough.

When shot eight times.

And a gun recovered later has no prints, no bullets fired. Official reports attribute it to the late Fong Lee.

The arrow’s other end lands in Saint Paul, on my roster. This Fong Lee is quiet, yet alive.

His shirt reads “I AM FONG LEE”

Poetry and politics, Shakespeare and Espada, and who knows if Fong has read either man’s work?

This one gets the joke because he tells it, but forgive his lack of laughter: There’s nothing funny about having to know that some kid with your moniker and migratory history was killed by cops not fifteen miles away.

Indiana Jones only had snakes and caricatures of Nazis to contend with. This shit is for real.

An animated arrow splits in two, dead ends, but cannot retract. It must remain, A red stain on a map.

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BIO

Daniel Muro LaMere is a teacher and writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes about music at thisistheshuffler.wordpress.com.

ABOUT

Most of what appears here is poetry, with some essays and other writings. All work should be considered the intellectual property of Daniel Muro LaMere and copyrighted as such. The author knows zero about intellectual property law, but is married to an attorney, so watch it.